Extract

The subjects of this session range from physics through neurophysiology to epidemiology but can, without using too high a level of abstraction, be related by the underlying presumption that the separation of dissolved gas from solution upon decompression leads to the formation of bubbles in the body and that they, in turn, produce pathological effects. An increasingly large workforce was exposed to raised pressures during the second half of the nineteenth century particularly in building the foundations of a bridge by the method of Triger (1841), a method that used compressed air to exclude water from the workings. The disturbances caused by the application of pressure and, more seriously, following the reduction in pressure were described by many authors from France, Italy, Germany, Great Britain and the United States of America. So there was a considerable body of observational data and hypothesis available by 1900 and the first experimental studies of decompression had been done by Bert (1878). He established that gas was indeed produced on decompression; that, after exposure to compressed air, the main constituent of bubbles was nitrogen and he thought it probable that such bubbles caused the signs and symptoms previously recognized as being associated with decompression.

Footnotes

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